For anyone doing business online, article marketing is one of the most popular ways to enhance your seo efforts. With the introduction of article submission tools, the task of distributing your articles across the Internet is easier than ever before. There are a number of rules you should follow if you want to get the most from your article marketing.

In this article, I will give you some article writing and submission guidelines that I’ve personally used to enhance the overall impact of my submissions and guarantee that articles are placed on web pages with a high Google PR.

Article marketing gives your article content a life well beyond a single listing. Website owners visit article aggregation websites to find relevant content for their website, blog, or ezine. Your article can be published for quite some time after it’s submitted and posted. The real value of article submission is when third party sites provide a link back to your website in exchange for the content you have provided them.

Timely And Valuable Content Is King. When creating an article, spend more time on the planning phase than the actual writing of the article. You want to make sure that the information you provide is related to something current and of interest to your potential audience. By doing so, other website owners find true value in the content and post it to their website or blog.

Write Your Article Around A Keyword Phrase. When you write an article about a particular subject, select a keyword phrase that helps to promote your website or service. The result is that search engines will be able to find your content easily based on the specific keywords noted.

Create A Strong Headline. By developing a compelling headline, readers are pulled into your article and take notice. Even though your primary purpose is content distribution and building in-bound links to your web site or blog, don’t lose sight of promoting your content in a valuable way. Article submission works best when your headline requires individuals to stop and take notice. This leads to greater awareness and action among webmasters seeking content.

Submit Your Articles To Article Directories. To get the most from your article marketing, look for top ranked article web sites using some type of article submission tool, software, or application that can provide an indication of a web sites age or Google PR. By doing so, you’ll be able to spend more time submitting to web sites that can provide real value to your article marketing efforts.

Focus On The Author Section. The most valuable aspect of article marketing is the link placed in the article content itself or in the author section. Links provide valuable information for search engine purposes and can drive users back to your website. Article links can be provided in two ways. The first is through a link back to your website. This is a link to your website presented in the actual body of the article. The second is in the author section. The first type of link is almost never accepted by article directories. The second, which provides information about the author of the article, is usually less than a couple hundred words and usually accepts an html link back to your website. Choose your link text carefully and include with each article.

Submit Your Articles To Top Sites. Don’t waste your time submitting your article to sites that are brand new or only have a low Google PR. Find top ranked article sites using some type of article submission tool, software, or application that can give you indication of site age or Google PR. This helps you to spend your precious time submitting to websites that can truly provide value to your article marketing efforts.

Article marketing continues to be a great way to improve your websites search engine ranking. With the help of original content and links back to your website or blog, search engines take notice and assign your site a great deal of value.

If you’re doing business on the Internet then you are someone who considers article marketing as an important part of your search engine optimization strategy. Not only can article marketing help you promote your website, but original content is viral in nature and builds your traffic to your website over time.

Our SEO strategy for a website begins from the selection of a domain name of your company, designing, development, keyword research, optimization, search engine compaigns, directory submissions, reciprocal and one way link building, and social media optimization methods.

Basic elements of SEO Strategy are:-

Here is a brief overview of how article marketing works and how it can benefit your efforts as an affiliate.

First, you should identify a product niche that you’re knowledgeable about, and then write an article related to that topic. At the end of the article, you can add a ‘resource box.’ Typically, this is a couple of sentences about you and what you have to offer, followed by a link to your website, where you can then direct people to useful products in that niche.

The trick here is to use those sentences to entice people to click on your link. An easy way to accomplish this is to offer a free report or other freebie related to your niche market.

Next, you’ll submit that article (for free) to various article directories on the web.

The two main directories to start with are:

www.ezinearticles.com and www.goarticles.com

To find more, just do a Google search for ‘article directory’ or ‘article directories.’

Please note that one of the conditions of publishing your article in these directories is that you allow other people to republish your articles as long as they don’t change the content and leave your name and the resource box at the end of the article intact.

Don’t worry; this is a good thing, as it will lead to more traffic for you! There are two main ways this practice will get you additional traffic.

1) Getting Published

Website owners in the niche market you are writing about will come to these directories looking for suitable articles they can use as content on their websites or ezines.

If they pick your article to publish on their site, their visitors will see your website link in the resource box at the end of your article, which could generate extra traffic for you with no additional effort or expense on your part.

2) Search Engine Rankings

Article directories can rank highly in the search engine results, so your article may get a good search engine listing by being on some of these sites. This is especially the case if other websites link to your article.

To try to get a good search engine ranking, you should target specific keyword phrases you want to rank for and make sure to include them in your article. The less competitive the keyword, the better the chance your article will rank well in the search engines.

A note of caution-don’t overdo your keyword targeting by stuffing loads of keywords into the article. If you do this, many people won’t want to read your article or click on your link, and the search engines may punish you for writing “spammy” content. This completely defeats the purpose of article marketing, which is to provide useful information that gets people to take the action you want them to take.

Instead of repeating your keyword dozens of times, just get your main keyword in there a few times, and start the article title with your keyword if you can. Your best bet is to strike a balance between having your keyword in your article enough to get noticed by search engines and keeping it readable, informative, and enjoyable for actual humans. After all, it doesn’t matter how many visitors see your article if it doesn’t convince anyone to click on your link!

In addition to getting your articles ranked in the search engines, you can also increase your own website’s search engine rankings by linking to it from your articles. With each article you submit, the more links you’ll have to your site, and the better your rankings will be.

That’s article marketing in a nutshell. Give it a try, and be aware that it may take some time and effort before you start seeing results. The best article marketers put a lot of time and effort into improving their work, just like any author, but since it’s a free and simple way to generate traffic and sales, it’s well worth the time you invest!

Dave Gale is an Internet marketer specializing in information publishing. To read more of Dave’s articles, visit http://www.publishingsuccessblog.com.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers,” a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

History

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.^[1] The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine’s own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, as well as any and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase search engine optimization probably came into use in 1997.^[2]

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page’s content. But using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable because the webmaster’s choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site’s actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches.^[3] Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.^[4]

By relying so much on factors such as keyword density which were exclusively within a webmaster’s control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

While graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed “backrub,” a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links.^[5] PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.^[6] Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.^[7] In recent years major search engines have begun to rely more heavily on off-web factors such as the age, sex, location, and search history of people conducting searches in order to further refine results.

By 2007, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.^[8] The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.^[9][10] SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.^[11].

Webmasters with search engines

By 1997 search engines recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and that some webmasters were even manipulating their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. Early search engines, such as Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms in an effort to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings.^[12]

Due to the high marketing value of targeted search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web,^[13] was created to discuss and minimize the damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.

SEO companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company, Traffic Power, which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients.^[14] Wired magazine reported that the same company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban.^[15] Google’s Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.^[16]

Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, chats, and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with site optimization.^[17][18][19] Google has a Sitemaps program^[20] to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Google guidelines are a list of suggested practices Google has provided as guidance to webmasters. Yahoo! Site Explorer provides a way for webmasters to submit URLs, determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and view link information.^[21]

Getting indexed

The leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click.^[22] Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results.^[23] Yahoo’s paid inclusion program has drawn criticism from advertisers and competitors.^[24] Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review.^[25] Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren’t discoverable by automatically following links.^[26]

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.^[27]

Preventing crawling

To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine’s database by using a meta tag specific to robots. When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam.^[28]

White hat versus black hat

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. The search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Some industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO.^[29] White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.^[30]

An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines^{[17][18][19][31]} are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility,^[32] although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines’ algorithms, or by a manual site review. Infamous examples are the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices.^[33] and the April 2006 removal of the PPC Agency BigMouthMedia^[34] All three companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list.^[35]

As a marketing strategy

Eye tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a search results page from top to bottom and left to right (for left to right languages), looking for a relevant result. Placement at or near the top of the rankings therefore increases the number of searchers who will visit a site.^[36] However, more search engine referrals does not guarantee more sales. SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator’s goals.^[37] A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic to web pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and improving a site’s conversion rate.^[38]

SEO may generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors.^[39] It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.^[40] A top-ranked SEO blog Seomoz.org^[41] has reported, “Search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a very small share of their traffic from search engines.” Instead, their main sources of traffic are links from other websites.^[42]

International markets

A Baidu search results page

The search engines’ market shares vary from market to market, as does competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches.^[43] In markets outside the United States, Google’s share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of 2007.^[44] As of 2006, Google had an 85-90% market share in Germany.^[45] While there were hundreds of SEO firms in the US at that time, there were only about five in Germany.^[45]

In Russia the situation is reversed. Local search engine Yandex controls 50% of the paid advertising revenue, while Google has less than 9%.^[46] In China, Baidu continues to lead in market share, although Google has been gaining share as of 2007.^[47]

Successful search optimization for international markets may require professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market, and web hosting that provides a local IP address. Otherwise, the fundamental elements of search optimization are essentially the same, regardless of language.^[45]

Legal precedents

On October 17, 2002, SearchKing filed suit in the United States District Court, Western District of Oklahoma, against the search engine Google. SearchKing’s claim was that Google’s tactics to prevent spamdexing constituted a tortious interference with contractual relations. On May 27, 2003, the court granted Google’s motion to dismiss the complaint because SearchKing “failed to state a claim upon which relief may be granted.”^[48][49]

In March 2006, KinderStart filed a lawsuit against Google over search engine rankings. Kinderstart’s web site was removed from Google’s index prior to the lawsuit and the amount of traffic to the site dropped by 70%. On March 16, 2007 the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose Division) dismissed KinderStart’s complaint without leave to amend, and partially granted Google’s motion for Rule 11 sanctions against KinderStart’s attorney, requiring him to pay part of Google’s legal expenses. ^[50][51]

Notes

Background

Article marketing has been used by professionals for nearly as long as mass print has been available. In paper-print form (as opposed to online forms), article marketing is utilized commonly by business owners as a means of obtaining free press space. A local business provides useful content to the newspaper free of charge, and in return the newspaper prints the business’ contact information with the article. Because newspapers and other traditional media are expected to present content on limited budgets, this arrangement is generally advantageous for all parties involved.

For example, an accounting firm may market itself by writing an article entitled “The Top 10 Ways to Avoid Being Audited” and offering it to the local newspapers several weeks prior to tax season. Similarly, a roofing company may offer radio stations a concise article entitled “How to Avoid Ice Damage to Your Roof this Winter” shortly before the winter season.

Online article marketing

With the rise of e-commerce and Internet marketing, article marketing has made a move to the online world as well. As in traditional forms of media, online article marketing has served the dual role of providing publishers with what amounts to free content, and advertisers with similarly free advertising.

The website where an author can post an article is known as an article directory. The primary reason an author can post an article without cost is that the directory owner places advertising on each article page and collects the revenue generated from the advertising. The article directory site gradually increases its own search engine popularity as more articles are posted, benefitting both the author and the directory owner with increased visitor numbers and therefore article page views.

However unlike the off-line version, there are additional dimensions to article marketing online. Most notable among the differences is the use of articles for search engine optimization. Articles are written to target particular keyword niches, and distributed to content publishers that cater to those markets. Authors are able to target their audience with informative content, sent to an already-interested group of readers.

Many online article marketers enjoy the low cost of this type of advertising and so have written hundreds and sometimes thousands of articles. One online article writer has written 12,900 articles. These prolific article authors also enjoy abundant backlinks (i.e., links pointing back to the business’ website). When the articles are distributed via RSS, the exposure to the authoring business and number of backlinks is increased greatly.

Because of this, article marketing has been the victim of junk content over the past few years. It’s important that article marketers be careful not to abuse the Internet and post poor quality content on the web just for promotional purposes; smart article marketers use scientifically proven techniques that dig deep into their own businesses and their readers’ concerns and needs and tactfully persuades them to click through to their web sites.

Another article marketing option available is where the author can choose to take control of the advertising space on the page where his article is posted. With this option the author has the choice to either have no advertising to compete with the article, or to have control over the advertising on the page along with the revenue generated.

Web 2.0

Article marketing has become increasingly popular as a marketing method under the Web 2.0 generation of business on the Internet. Many subjects have gained popularity through viral propagation of articles via social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

The sudden popularity of article marketing has caused an overall reduction in quality in many subjects, mainly due to individuals writing low-quality articles as a quick way of achieving exposure. Efficient use of article marketing as a form of promotion requires invested effort in writing high-quality, relevant articles.^[1]

Article marketing and search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) deals with the order in which webpages are ranked when keywords or phrases are typed into search engines. The higher a page is ranked, the more likely that page will draw a greater number of site visitors. For company websites, increased traffic often translates into increased sales, and article marketing has proven to be useful and effective for several leading Internet marketing ventures.

One method of SEO encompasses the idea that a website’s rank in search engines will rise as it obtains more backlinks. Therefore, writing and distributing articles that contain a link to a business owner’s website within the bio box should result in more links back to that website. Theoretically this process will increase that website’s rank within search engines. This theory has led to a trend in online marketing toward writing articles solely for SEO purposes, and are commonly referred to as reprint articles. This trend has been matched by a wide selection of article marketing directory websites which accept, vet, and provide redistribution of such articles to online publishers.

The free distribution of articles has, however, led to a large amount of duplicated content appearing on websites across the Internet. The quality of articles can also suffer as some authors seek a large quantity of backlinks at the possible expense of content quality.^[2]

Recently there is a new breakthrough in the article marketing technique. This new breakthrough minimizes the possibility of duplicated content across internet. The technique involves proprietary algorithm based on article spinning method. Unique Article Wizard is an example of article distribution center that use this method. Using this technology, completely unique articles can be shown in many article directory, such as those shown in Gigantesque Articles Directory.

Sources

1.  [Kwan, K. (2008), Entrepreneurial Steroids: Article Science that Triples 3X CTR and PUMPS Sales & ROI, 6WRiters Publishing Group]
2.  [Kwan, K. (2008), Entrepreneurial Steroids: Article Science that Triples 3X CTR and PUMPS Sales & ROI, 6WRiters Publishing Group]